In Search of an Alternative Feminist Cinema: Gender, Crisis, and the Cultural Discourse of Nation Building in Chinese Independent Films

Jinhua Li is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies and Language at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Jinhua Li received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from Purdue University, specializing in comparative cinema studies, transnational cultural studies and gender politics. Dr. Li has published many journal articles and book reviews on gender politics in transnational Chinese language cinemas, and is currently working on a monograph on gender politics in contemporary Chinese cinema. Chinese feminist cinema in the postsocialist era is shaped by the grand narrative of nation building that glamorizes urban professional career women and their contributions to economic marketization and globalization. Such cinematic overemphasis on urban women proves inadequate as it creates a disturbing silence about the diasporic existence of non-urban women. This uneven condition demands the creation of an alternative cinematic feminism that visualizes the diversity of Chinese women and represents the heterogeneity of feminist cinematic expressions and female experiences. Using Li Yu’s Lost in Beijing (2007, Pingguo 苹果) and Li Yang’s Blind Mountain (2007, Mang shan 盲山) as case studies, this essay investigates how Chinese independent films re-negotiate female gender identity and crisis through commercialized visual realism and social intervention while in reality the postsocialist grand narrative of nation building redefines the living conditions of female migrant workers and women of limited resources.